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'This is How We Die' or 'Are there any windows in this hole?'

This is How We Die, Chistopher Brett Bailey,

Battersea Arts Centre, 31st October 2014

I’m not sure about this. It’s a
Friday night, I’ve had a glass of wine, I’m a little bit shattered and that guy
sitting behind a desk on an abandoned stage, cocooned in a half light, looks
very earnest and very kooky and very, very tired. I’m not really sure about
this at all - and then he opens his mouth and a wall of sounds hits me. There are
words somewhere in all that sound but it feels like this man is screaming into
my ear and through to my skull, blasting over and over again. I glance at my
friend and she looks like she is going to piss herself laughing, or maybe just cry.
This was probably a mistake. The whole show is starting to remind me of those silly
scenes you see on films, when a couple of young things decide to give theatre a
try, go out on a date, and are confronted with a steaming pile of pretension
and – seriously – there are some beautiful phrases amidst all this noise and
this man looks and speaks like a poet but am I meant to be understanding any of
this? Am I meant to be hearing the words (a flicker of racism, of anger, the end
of the world)? Is all this noise meant to hurt us, our eyes cast down and our
cheeks flushed, part embarrassed and part just a little bit pissed off?

But then the man with the spiky
hair and the socket eye face finally slows down and the noise lets up and he
looks up at us for the first time. I hadn’t even seen him! With all that noise
and all that battering sound, the hunched man in front of me had completely disappeared.
But now his speech slows, his face bends up towards us and his eyes glitter. I
look at my friend and she looks less aghast and more excited. We have both been
drawn right inside this warped little Friday night show.

The noise has stopped and the
scrunched up little man – Christopher – is starting to tell us a very strange
story about a very strange road trip in a fucked up America with a very strange
girlfriend. He speaks in a series of film shots and the images, hundreds of
hundreds of them, pile up in our heads as this lonely little chap leads us
through his twisted and sliding, cascading adventure. The man and his
girlfriend stop at a petrol station and all hell breaks loose in a flurry of
mutilated snap shots. We cut to a mini Jesus figurine car in the window,
weeping or praying or doing something awful or weird. We glimpse a priest’s
pair of boots and a little kid cowering inside. It feels like everything is
about to explode. A snippet of music, and then another, whizzes in and out of
shot, cutting through the story and insisting on its own boom, boom, booming
beat.

And then this strange little man
and his strange little girlfriend are visiting the in-laws – or did that come
before, it’s hard to think straight with such a mind bending show - and the
normal and abnormal collide. Girlfriend mummy and girlfriend daddy (who incidentally
is really, no really, re-set in the shape of a walking swastika) sit down with their
strange little girl and her strange little boyfriend – and they prod and they
poke and spit and swear and a B movie vomits all over them; cars and wheels and
limbs and blood; smashed glass and screams and laughter and chaos. The man and
his girl move on, Thelma and Louise turned inside out and with all the sense
and skin torn off, and they’re on the move again – but the boy keeps getting
distracted, taking great yawning leaps as his imagination snags on a word, an
image or a moment. His girlfriend tells him to go fuck himself and he runs
through the reality, texting himself and dating himself, touching himself and
finally – take this! – fucking himself, alone in his bedroom.

The images keep showering past
us, like a million dark comic books stapled together, glued to our eyelids and
flicked through, over and over again. The girl and the boy move on and the
sense of something bigger, hovering above or around them, begins to settle in
the darkest corner of our consciousness. They walk and they see the stars, the satellites
or something else big and huge and unreachable that hovers above. They walk on
together and they do very little but these vicious explosions of the
imagination lift them up and scatter them about, taking them to places endless
and awful and brilliant. They keep on walking and they throw their mobile
phones in a stream and there is something in there, in all those seething and
swelling thoughts and feelings and pictures, about the longing for a quieter
life, for a life less connected but more engaged, for a life when that wall of
noise stops smashing at our heads and something else, some little word or image
or idea that we might just understand, wriggles free and allows us to catch it
in our hands and really, really look at it.

And then this stuttering,
streaming, streaking story stops as abruptly as it begun and we are left with
nothing – until the lights – those lights that have been dimming and slowly
turning their glare away from the stage and onto our faces – dim right down and
musicians, just little patches of people in this whispering dim light, walk
onto the stage and begin to play. They play quietly at first and there is
something angelic about that music, just a memory of Bach, as the lights
gradually, slowly slowly, begin to flare up and something close to joyful fills
the stage – this is it, this is it, this is it! – but that instant of calm and beauty,
that glimpse at the heaven we do not believe in but dream about anyway, that
soothing snatch of meaning or purpose that might make sense of it all, is slowly
lost in the gradual build of the music and the exposure of the lights, which all
began as something comforting and beautiful but are becoming stronger and brighter,
hotter and closer. The noise builds and builds and folds on top of itself and
the lights push harder and harder at our faces and those little moments of
meaning and respite are being smashed into nothing until we are left with a brick
wall, a wall as big as the room and beyond, forced up in front of us and
pushing and pushing and pushing until we cannot see, we cannot feel, we cannot
breathe and we would do anything in the world to make it all - just - stop.